


Over and Over

by sopi497



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Inspired by Russian Doll (2019), Multi, The Geralt/Yennefer is only mentioned, can be read as shippy but not neccessary, mentioned castration, mentioned rape, this is pretty violent y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:48:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24944128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sopi497/pseuds/sopi497
Summary: This is how the life of Jaskier the bard ends.-Only it doesn’t.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 1
Kudos: 37





	Over and Over

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!  
> This is my first fic in this fandom, i hope you enjoy it!  
> This work was inspired by the excellent Netflix Series Russian Doll.  
> I like these boys but by god they're idiots.
> 
> Please note that english is not my first language, so there might be some mistakes.

If life could give me one blessing, it would be to take you off my hands!

It takes all of Jaskier’s considerable acting skills to not break down right then and there. He turns around sharply, mutters something of a goodbye to Geralt and stumbles off. He hopes Geralt doesn’t smell the bitter salt of the tears that begin to run down his face.

He should have seen this coming, he supposes. He should’ve seen it coming ever since witnessing him and Yennefer together in the destroyed house in Rinde. He can’t even blame the witch, even though he would love to do that. It’s truly Geralt who fucked his way into this mess. Jaskier just hadn’t expected it to hurt quite so much.

Jaskier’s tears and his emotional distraught numb him to everything else so he notices the loose rubble only when he’s already stumbling over it, falling head over heels down a steep climb on the side of the treacherous mountain. His body is stopped by sharp rocks at the bottom of it, shredding his clothes and breaking his bones. Finally, it ends, when the soft underside of his skull is cracked open by a curiously formed stone.

This is how the life of Jaskier the bard ends.

-

Only it doesn’t.

He takes another shuddering breath, and another and one more still and rips his eyes open with a scream.

He’s in the empty camp. It’s the third morning of the dragon hunt and he’s alone.

He pats his body, frantically looking for the wounds the mountain left on him, his ribs flattened and piercing his lungs, his arm limp and dangling where it popped out of the socket, his spine broken in five places, the vertebrae shifting loosely under his skin. His skull, smashed, with blood and brains spilling out.

But he’s unhurt, perfectly fine, aside from the high-quality blister on his left little toe.

He shudders and shakes himself of the vivid nightmare. It had felt so real, he could almost sense the phantom pains of his injuries.

As he makes his way up the rest of the mountain, looking for Geralt and the rest of the group, things look painfully familiar, too familiar for him to have dreamed them up. He passes the dwarves, standing in exactly the same formation as he passed them in his dream. This time, Jaskier says nothing, just hurries up, up to the site of the past battle. It’s already all said and done when he arrives and he curses Geralt for not waking him. It would’ve made a fantastic ballad, especially as he recognizes Borch. Jaskier is absolutely sure the man fell to his death and yet he’s standing there, right as rain.

Every little detail is exactly how it was in his dream, right down to the sharp words Geralt and Yen spit at each other. It makes him wary and he hesitates to approach Geralt.

Jaskier rethinks how he worded the next sentence in his dream and decides to tread more carefully.

“Geralt? Are you alright?”

The Witcher turns around sharply.

“Damn it, Jaskier!”

Well, fuck.

That didn’t work. Once again, Jaskier is stumbling away in tears.

He calms down rather quickly though and tries to make his way down the mountain carefully.

It not his own fault that he dies. A leftover Reaver gets to him, ramming a dagger into Jaskier’s chest until he crumbles, then steals his lute and his meager pack.

Jaskier lies there on cold rock and hard earth and drowns in his own blood.

-

He’s in the empty camp. It’s the third morning of the dragon hunt and he’s alone.

“Fuck!”

He curses wholeheartedly. So it hadn’t been a dream. It must be some sort of magic or curse he’s under. Most likely a curse which only gets broken when he learns some kind of bullshit lesson or something like that.

He stomps up the mountain again. The fight is over, and he finds Geralt and Yen still breathing hard and wild-eyed from the battle. He doesn’t care as he approaches Yennefer and asks : ”What did you do to me, witch? Why am I dying?”

Yen looks perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

“Something is happening to me and I keep dying and coming back to this morning!”

Yennefer laughs. “You’re in a time loop, bard.”

“What the fuck’s a time loop?”

“It’s a very old and very complicated curse. It meant to teach a lesson or resolve an issue. They’re impossible to lift, it’s upon the cursed to figure the lesson out.”

“And what is the fucking lesson, Yen? What am I meant to be learning here, because I’ve died twice already and I don’t care to repeat it!”

“How should I know? I didn’t place it, Jaskier. I’ve enough to be at without making a curse work that hasn’t been cast in centuries. Good luck with it.”

Jaskier huffs, frustrated, and turns to Geralt, only to catch the movement behind him.

One of the Reavers isn’t quite as dead as previously thought and threw a dagger at the back of Geralt’s head.

Jaskier shoves him to the side in an unexpected move, and the dagger finds his chest instead of the Witcher.

He falls and sees Geralt’s panicked expression as he kneels over Jaskier’s body while Yen runs off to finish with the thrower.

His heart seizes painfully around the tip of the knife, and then stops beating.

-

He’s in the empty camp. It’s the third morning of the dragon hunt and he’s alone.

Jaskier sighs and massages his chest above his heart, willing the phantom pain away.

He tries to go up again. He dies again.

He tries it two more times before he decides he can’t bear to see Geralt’s panicked face, feel his heavy arms clutching him as he tries to keep Jaskier alive.

Jaskier tries to make his way down the mountain. The first two times, the same pack of Reavers who had enough brains to leave the scene gets him, hacking him apart or raping him, first with their cocks, then with their knifes, until he’s bled out.

The third time, he makes it into the night and below the tree line. He breathes out, happy with the victory as he’s never made it this far. Then he gets gored by a raging boar.

The next day, he actually makes it into the village, and he finds out that the curse only resets when he dies, independent how much time passes between each death. He lives for two fantastic days, then he is wrongfully murdered by an angered husband and his friends.

They have him pinned to the side of the inn and stabbed one knife through his left palm, another through his right wrist.

Jaskier says: ”Just make it quick.”

They don’t. They laugh as they cut his cock off, as they cut open his stomach and rip out his entrails, as they leave him to bleed out. They don’t show him the mercy of cutting his throat.

The next time, he is very careful in the village and barely leaves the room at the inn. It doesn’t stop the wife of the man who killed him the last time around from slipping into his room and strangling him with a leather strip. She hisses something about revenge for fucking her man in his ear and Jaskier begins to think that it isn’t him that’s the problem here.

-

He’s in the camp again, and this time, he just decides to stay there all day. He composes and strums his lute and he waits. Waits for Geralt to get back, or anything else to happen. Nothing happens, except that his sounds attract a variety of small, seemingly harmless creatures, he can’t name.

As it turns out, they are not, in fact, harmless.

-

After these misadventures, he decides to try his luck in the fight again. Whenever he wakes up, he starts running as fast as he can up the mountain and joins in the last few minutes of fighting, swinging his lute wildly at everyone close to him. It gets him a dagger in the back two times, once he is shoved and breaks his skull on a very inconveniently placed rock.

Once, he gets burned alive, on accident, when he tries to protect the egg. Borch is defending it and mistakes him for an enemy. He screams as his skin melts and it is one of the more unpleasant deaths he had.

Yennefer kills him the next day. In the heat of battle, she is throwing knifes and spells faster than the eye can catch and he is inconveniently locked in a fight with one man she targets. His opponent turns them around, and the spell hits Jaskier. He has time to catch Yen’s shocked eyes before his heart explodes.

-

It’s Geralt who kills him after that. It’s an accident, but it still ends with the iron sword buried deep in his lung. Geralt lets go of the handle and grabs Jaskier’s shoulders instead, lowering him to the ground, wild panic in his eyes, already mixing with grief, because he knows Jaskier is not going to walk this one off.

“Fuck, Jaskier…”

The Bard doesn’t hear the rest as his body goes numb. He dies, not hearing Geralt’s desperate shouts.

-

After that, he decides to just go through the as normally as possible, lets Geralt have it out with Yen and then lets Geralt shout at him. He tries a variety of words to placate the irate Witcher, but none of it works. Then he tries to stop them from fighting which only earns him a hard slap from Yen and a firm warning to stay out of her business.

He tries saying nothing at all to Geralt, just waits for the Witcher to do something, but that only results in him freezing to death when he falls asleep on top of the mountain and the Witcher leaves without him.

That Asshole.

Jaskier is getting frustrated, to say it mildly.

Geralt kills him once more, and this time there's a strange kind of grim satisfaction in Jaskier as he lets out his last breath. It's a sort of revenge for the first time Geralt hurt him on the mountain; a vicious, monstrous thought that Geralt deserves losing him in this way as a late consequence of his actions.

-

He falls down the mountainside twice more when he leaves Geralt, both times his death is prolonged and extremely painful, as his spine breaks and he suffocates slowly. At least the creatures down here wait until he’s dead. He doesn’t care to repeat the experience of being eaten alive.

He gets stung by a bee on the next loop, and finds out that he is deathly allergic.

-

Jaskier doesn’t even recall how many times he’s died. It had to be up to fifty times by now and he is exhausted. Mentally, for his body is always in pristine condition each time he wakes up again.

He goes up the mountain again and sits trough the fight between Geralt and Yennefer. He watches as she disappears and as Geralt stares angrily into the valley and at the surrounding mountains.

He gets up and asks Geralt if he’s alright. Gods, Jaskier is tired of it.

Geralt yells at him, curses him and blames him for everything, and Jaskier just snaps.

“Shut the fuck up, you stupid asshole!”

Now, that gets a reaction. Geralt is used to being cursed at, and he’s been called much worse, but not by Jaskier. Never by Jaskier.

“It is not my fault you’re in this situation right now. I didn’t ask you to go on this hunt, in fact I begged you to leave it alone. Also, it was not my stupid idea to go looking for a djinn because you can’t sleep and it certainly isn’t my fucking fault you made an idiotic wish that caused us to go to Yennefer in the first place. And at the banquet, I really thought you had enough brains in your empty head to not invoke the law of surprise _one fucking minute_ after seeing the havoc it can cause!”

Geralt is quiet for a second.

“Jaskier, I…”

“It’s always me who gets your worst and I’m sick of it! It’s your fucking fault I’m in this loop. You’re the reason I keep dying. You killed me that first time, Geralt, and you keep killing me! What a convenient way to be rid of me!”

Geralt face is meandering between hurt and confusion.

“Jaskier, what are you talking about?”

“I’m stuck in a fucking time loop, Geralt. You said these words to me about fifty days ago and instead of doing this I just left and I died. And then I wake up on the morning of this day again. Yennefer told me there’s supposed to be some kind of lesson I have to learn to be break the curse but the only thing I’ve learned is that dying hurts and that I’m allergic to bees. And that you’re a fucking asshole who treats the one person in the world that actually cares about him like complete dog shit. Maybe that’s the lesson. That I should just leave and let you be a bastard all by yourself.”

“Jaskier…I’m sorry.” That looked like it actually, physically hurt the Witcher.

“I shouldn’t have said that. Just, don’t leave. It’s not safe.”

“I know it’s not safe, Geralt. Do you want to know how many times I died trying to get down this fucking mountain? Would you like to know what it feels like to choke on your own blood? To wait for death while you can’t move cause your spine is crushed? To be eaten alive, piece by piece? To have you staring into my eyes because you accidentally killed me?”

Jaskier can’t help the tears streaming down his face now as he remembers all the hurt, all the panic, all the pain.

Suddenly, he is enveloped by strong arms and his face is pressed against black leather as Geralt hugs him.

“I’m sorry that happened to you, Jask, and I’m sorry I killed you. Let me help you get down this time.”

-

They make it down, though it takes them a while. Jaskier is extremely careful and treads very lightly and hesitantly.

After it, they had for the coast. Jaskier relaxes after a few weeks of not dying. Maybe that had been the solution, to get Geralt to come down with him.


End file.
